Safari 11 Bypassing Anti-Auto Play

Hey everyone!


I am developing a site which one of it's core features is playing music. It works flawlessly on any browser except for Safari. After hours of investigation I discovered a setting in Safari, preventing websites from auto playing media. Once I disabled this feature (so I allowed auto playing media) the music was being played on Safari flawlessly too.


I now need to discover a way to bypass the auto playing media block Safari has implemented as it's default setting. I tried googling around but any problem like mine has remained unanswered, at least from what I found.


I know this is possible to fix because so many popular sites (i.e. Netflix, Youtube, Soundcloud, Spotify, etc.) all work perfectly on Safari.


Any help would be great, thanks!

Replies

>all work perfectly on Safari.


I suspect it's because as heavy hitters, they enjoy the benefits that come w/being whitelisted.


The rest of us are left to inform users to visit preferences/websites/general/auto-play where they can choose which setting for a given site on the list.

Post not yet marked as solved Up vote reply of KMT Down vote reply of KMT

Hi Nicster,


It isn't exactly a whitelist and Apple does not take any requests for a site to get the Allow All Auto-Play setting by default.


Safari in macOS High Sierra uses differential privacy to algorithmically identify an up-to-date set of websites for which most users prefer auto-play with sound, such as popular video websites like Netflix, YouTube, and Twitch. Our algorithmic approach allows us infer auto-play policies worldwide, and is capable of identifying and adapting to trending new websites. Default site settings are updated regularly, generally coinciding with Safari update releases.


The signal for a user preferring auto-play is generally based on interactions with the site that indicate users want media with sound to play on that site. Users that change their own auto-play setting for a site do not directly affect that signal.


Ensuring your video player controls are auto-play blocking aware will prevent a broken playback experience that would adversley affect user signals. You can find tips on how to handle Auto-Play blocking on the WebKit blog post "Auto-Play Policy Changes for macOS".


Best wishes,

Jon

Hi,


I have a website with videos. Videos autoplay with mute sound. I tested youtube. Here videos autoplay with sound enabled.

I noticed that for youtube, in Safari settings Auto-Play is set to Allow All Auto-play. but on my website it is different value by default. I want "Allow All Auto-play" enabled on my website as well.

How much traffic is required to get "Allow All Auto-play" enabled by default? How safari monitors traffic and how it is analyzed? How this algorithm identifies up-to-date websites and average number of users to enable "Allow All Auto-play" by default?


Regards,

Sundus

Hi,


I studied https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/12/06/learning-with-privacy-at-scale.html. I want to know more details i-e

1. Which information is stored for autoplay detection in Safari?

2. How Apple team analyzes the histograms?

3. What is the criteria to decide which sites should be given "Allow All Auto-play" by default, is there a specific number that should be crossed or it is relatively compared with other video sites?

4. If a site is given "Allow All Auto-play", it is for all users visiting that site including those who are visiting for the first time or it is different for different users visiting same site depending upon their interactions?

5. On iOS devices i-e iPhone and iPads Safari and Firefox, is there any way to get media content autoplay with sound by default on a site?


My site gets around 53948 Safari visitors for 52 days still videos autoplay with mute sound.


Regards,

Sundus

Curious how to get on this whitelist.

We run odysee.com which has playlist / autoplay next functionality. We use videojs and we keep the player in memory, and the browser still randomly pauses the next video when it's up. Sometimes it will work, but rarely.